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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

I would say the city being “closed” is the major driver. Among my group of ~40 coworkers, about 30 (including me) have left the city. As far as I know all but one were renting.

Everyone who left gave the following rationale:

- we can work remotely so move wherever or nomad now

- SF is not very fun during the pandemic

- WFH in my tiny apartment is much less enjoyable than when I was working in the office and didn’t spend much time in the apartment

- therefore I’m moving for a year or so until things fully reopen

Now I think the question is what does the eventual full reopening look like and how long does it take?

Many people will move back, because many office jobs will return, and many people love city life and the office work environment (including me).

But the longer things take, the more people get established elsewhere, and the more companies decide to make remote permanent and don’t reopen an office, the more I think this market reset in SF will be long-lasting.

As other posters have said it’s a welcome relief though. Prices are still very high, and new construction remains far from sufficient to keep up with demand.

(edit: typo)

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What is curious to me is that NYC rents haven't seen the same crater at all (link says 15% but anecdotally most of the desirable top of market neighborhoods aren't budging). I don't buy the "SF is not very fun during the pandemic" rationale as more special than any other notable city, and NYC tends to have less space than SF. To me, that says the SF case has more complexity. IMO, the key factor here is that there appears to be a much higher ratio of people that were primarily there because work was best there, where many other cities have populations that tend to choose the city in question specifically more than happen upon it.

Speaking anecdotally I think this has some truth in it. A lot of people I know seem to loathe San Francisco and only put up with it because they’re required to live here for a job.

If that’s the true reason for an exodus, then I hope it benefits the city to have residents that want to live here.

I lived in SF for a year and hated it. I don’t belong there: it’s not for me.

Perhaps the phenomenon of “X months free rent” is more pervasive in NYC.

E.g. https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/market-insight/rental-buildin...

What little I understand is if a landlord is leveraged (?) up the wazoo, the lending bank can make the landlord pay a lump sum if the revenue projections on which the loan is made shrink, since the risk is higher. Somehow, free months don’t count against these revenue projections (assumed a one-off?), through what I imagine is the magic of contract law. The higher end, nicer real estate is probably more highly leveraged. Someone in RE can probably clarify this better.

our rent went down, total, a little more than a third. half was a price drop and half was the averaged value of 2 free months, which we will have to pay back if we leave before the lease is up. We had budgeted an increase, so it’s a covid windfall. Less traffic and one of the lowest covid numbers in the union atm are a bonus. The constant smoke in the air is the real problem. Haven’t had a blackout yet.

It is, but that was true pre-pandemic, so that won't mark a shift in prices either way. That's baked into last year and this year.

I haven't seen rents really drop in LA either. Commercial landlords would rather let the building go half vacant and try offering 1-2 months of free rent before they drop the base rent.

From what I've read, in the case of commercial lets there's a good reason for this.

The companies that manage these properties acquire/refinance loans based on the value of their assets and the value of their assets is mostly determined by the rent they ask for, much less the rent they are actually getting. This leads to commercial landlords refusing to budge on a ridiculous price that was determined in different market conditions and as a result will opt to leave it vacant.

Taking the lower price would adversely affect their access to financing and could put them under water (they already were) on their loans.

Why these agreement/loans don't take this problem into account to prevent this situation is a total mystery though.

Yeah it’s weird. I haven’t seen for rent signs before but now I see them on every single building but rents are same. It probably means landlords are basically charging too much and making too much money and not paying enough in taxes(1-2% tax increase per year is probably nothing compared to increases in rent prices)

if you do the math, it's expensive to let a unit sit for more than a couple months as opposed to offering a discount on the rent. This assumes your tenant will turnover in a couple years time, mind you.

I did the math for SF and IIRC ~2mo was equal to a 15% discount. if it sits empty for longer than 2mo, you should have just given the 15% discount. if you let is sit for 2mo AND have to give a 15% discount, now you've really fucked your finances up.

You're ignoring the fact that SF has rent control; it resets only once a vacancy hits.

If market rate was 3k a few months back, but is only 2k now, if you take a 15-year view, it's still cheaper to let your rent-controlled unit sit unrented for 12mo than rent it at just 2k for 15 years provided the 3k/mo rates recover in two years.

Basically, that's one of the major reasons why rent-controlled units aren't going down in prices. Bundle in Prop 13, and you aren't even paying any real property taxes on those units to sting your finances.

No, I'm not forgetting that.

In my experience, most market rate units turn over every 2 or 3 years. 15 years in sf apartment leases are unusual except for people who cannot afford to move out.

If you assumption, as a landlord, is that the next person into your unit isn't moving for 15 years, then yes, the cost calculation moves. However, that calculation is very different from a 7 year calculation, which is very different from a 2 year calculation. So how much are you going to hedge against not losing money in the future, when you're losing concrete money right now?

> 15 years in sf apartment leases are unusual except for people who cannot afford to move out.

I'm a little confused here. If your rent is 1.2k for a 2bd in SF (because resident since 2000s), whereas market rate for a 2bd now is 3.9k in SF -- what is your determination -- is a person able or not able to move-out?

Why would anyone move out every 2 to 3 years if they're rent-controlled, and they'd have to pay significantly more for any new place?

Likewise, if you've been owning a property since the old times, and it's fully paid off, the property tax liability in Cali is tiny, and for older owners perhaps entirely a wash-off due to infamous Prop 13. Which is part of the reason that many owners don't even bother renting their properties.

I think properties are somehow valued based on the rent potential, so landlords are disincentivized to move base rent and would rather offer 1-2-3 months free and keep rent at standard rate.

you can easily take this into account too, and my calculation did. Assuming your tenant is staying for 2-3 years, you can really only afford to let it set empty for a few months. Your yearly rent increases are just a couple percent (tenths of pecents a month). Every month it sits empty is 8% of your yearly income for the unit.

The yearly income isn't what's important to these landlords, it's the real estate value of the property. Loosing out on a full year or more of rental income is the cost of doing business if it keeps the underlying valued high and appreciating.

Considering prices have surged over the last two decades, landlords are making money hand over fist. Tax is teensy thanks to prop 13.

I recently moved from Manhattan to outside New York (for reasons mostly unrelated to the pandemic; my roommate decided to move in with his significant other, and I didn't want to pay for a 1 BR in Manhattan). The building we used to live in did officially originally say the rent would be increased for the next year, but when we told them we weren't staying, they pivoted and offered us three extra months for free if we signed on. I'm not sure if this is evidence for or against your statement that rent isn't falling much in New York, but I thought it was an interesting data point.

The article says NYC rents dropped by 15% which is still significant.

I just added a caveat about that, but many of the top of market neighborhoods people tend to go for here haven't dropped nearly that much (e.g West Village area, Chelsea, UES/UWS). NYC is huge and that drop is not spread equally. Guessing it isn't in SF either, but it seems 31% is going to hit every neighborhood at least a good deal.

Edited to add to this, see the spread in June:

https://www.renthop.com/studies/nyc/renthop-2020-subway-rent...

West 4th = West Village, up 7% YOY mid pandemic, even as other neighborhoods saw more drops.

Also see the trend here as editorialized around NYC on pace to overtake SF as the most expensive rent market: https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data/

A better graph near the bottom of this article to show how small the dip is for rentals: https://streeteasy.com/blog/august-2020-market-reports/

From what I’ve seen in San Francisco, the biggest decreases in rents have been in the newer upscale construction in SOMA. There’s nothing to do in SOMA other than walking to your tech office job and most of the restaurants around there are specifically for business lunch so many of them aren’t open now with the offices are be closed. Given all that, I imagine that area has seen the biggest exodus in the city. Plus the rents were stratospheric to begin with, so even a 30% drop is still ridiculously expensive. In other parts of San Francisco prices have dropped but not nearly as much as in SOMA.

This is all from my casual observations on craigslist and Zillow, I would love to see broader data and analysis if anyone has any

IME, sf has falled 20-30% even in desirable neighbourhoods.

You can get a recently renovated 3 bedroom with laundry and dishwasher, in a desirable area for $4500. Those bedrooms weren't going for less than $2k a year ago.

At least for the West Village, at least some of that is tempered by NYU. I’d imagine most of their overseas students are still renting.

SF is tiny compared to NYC. Much more of a buffer in NYC.

As a counter anecdote, I know three people from the bay area who moved out during covidtide, but had already planned the move beforehand. (This is a very high percentage of people I know from the bay area, hence the anecdote).

All had the same rationale: taxes and housing were simply far too high when they could work remotely and live anywhere else. Sure, you don't get the same outdoors, food or retail scene, but plenty of places have those things too.

I imagine the move to working remotely has made that move possible for more people than before, but those I know aren't making temporary moves, they are buying houses.

> food or retail scene

In my experience this is becoming less and less true, smaller cities are really catching up, it's not 2010 anymore. My pet theory is that social networks like Instagram have done a good job spreading fashion and food experiences/expectations that were previously exclusives to big city centers.

I keep reading people make this claim.

I haven't found it to be even remotely true for the food my family is inclined to eat. Every time I've gone to visit hip small college towns for the last 5 years, I've eagerly sought out the talked-about eateries, and they were all... distinctly mediocre compared to NYC or Bay Area or LA food.

You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food, even the California-cuisine upscale places are decidedly mediocre, and the food trucks are... fine.

Certainly, it's better than it was at the margin, but it really depends on what your baseline is.

I’m honestly surprised so many people put Bay Area/SF food on the same scale as NYC and LA. It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO. For middle-tier dining I think SF and the Bay Area don’t even come close to either of those cities. In fact I think those hip young college towns are much better, in my experience. It’s just that it’s going to be a different set of foods: more barbecue, Mexican, Central European, soul food, and less asian/what I would call “California health” foods.

Agreed, I feel like SF restaurants are relatively pricey, so in order to get the good stuff you'll have to pay a lot more than in many other places in the world.

Sf has some great hole in the wall places that aren’t too expensive. E.g. Tonga room isn’t that badly priced

Dropping 50$/person on dinner & drinks in sf isn’t that much money when your rent is 50x+ that figure.

Tonga room is a terrible example because, as someone else mentioned, it's a bar in the Fairmont.

If you want a great literal hole in the wall, try Yamo in the Mission. Burmese food, grand total of 6 seats (all at the bar) in the restaurant, and the entire kitchen is right in front of you. $6 entrees.

The SF Bay Area as a whole has some great holes in the wall, and there's even still some in San Francisco proper if you dig around, but in addition to being a bar in the Fairmont as others have noted, the Tonga Room is a world-famous tiki bar that opened in 1945, with two themed dining rooms that wrap around an artificial lagoon with a "rainstorm" every thirty minutes. That's a really weird definition of hole-in-the-wall. :)

While I haven't been up to SF proper for food and barhopping in a few years now, the Lark up in the financial district is much more of what I'd call a good cheap bar. I tend to bristle a bit at people dissing the SF food and drink scene, but I have to remind myself that with few exceptions my favorite places in the Bay Area aren't actually in SF itself. The metro area as a whole has virtually everything you can imagine at a very wide range of price points. I suspect one could make a case that the most interesting stuff happening is in the East Bay and South Bay, though.

A bar inside the Fairmont hotel could hardly be described as a “hole in the wall”

This is enough to say that then it isn't comparable. "There exists" is only a useful quantifier in mathematics. "There exists" better food elsewhere if you idk pay a world reknown chef to cook you a meal herself for $5000.

I lived in LA for a long time and I would say NYC has it beat by a large margin when it comes to bourgie restaurants. Most of the hip places in LA are uniformly terrible, the places that have been around a long time are about as good as the same kinds of places in NYC, and the various ethnic restaurants are better in LA (assuming they’re in their neighborhood enclaves).

I would say middle tier food in SF is easily better than NYC.

Well, agree to disagree. Personally I've found food in the $15-40 range in NYC to be better executed and be a better value, with more options. I think other cities also blow SF out of the water with execution and value for that price range, but few are able to compete on the diversity of options.

Only if youre eating mexican or clam chowder.

> It only makes sense when you consider top-tier fine dining (like, Michelin star(s)) IMO

Within a narrow window. The diversity and turnover of New York or London’s food offerings compared with the Bay Area’s is on par with the latter’s offerings in relation to Fresno’s. If anything, the Bay offers its uniqueness in the middle tier of immigrant fusion.

Lots of people like to believe this but it really, really isn’t true.

Los Angeles and New York City have a substantially larger cultural footprint than other cities.

Even though the variety of food, music, etc. is growing quickly elsewhere, it’s really not the same.

Yeah. The problem is that food is not something you can do remote, and so specialized chefs and specialty ingredients need clusters of people to be profitable to sell.

My baseline is grilled cheddar cheese on plain white bread with Campbell's Tomato Soup is the greatest food ever invented. I once went to a work lunch at one of the city's most raved about restaurants. I ordered the grilled cheese and tomato soup. That was when I realized that I really am not a food connoisseur. How can something so simple as grilled cheese and tomato soup be so thoroughly ruined, just in an effort to make it fancy?

You can't serve something like that at a restaurant and make it in a plain way, because it's something that basically everyone can make at home for really cheap. People are looking for an interesting take on something like that in a restaurant, which isn't going to fit what you want.

That's a poor choice to judge a restaurant on. You need to base your judgement on things you can't or won't cook at home because it takes too much time, is too complicated, or uses ingredients that are difficult to get.

Well, you can't make something simple in a simple way unless you are both really confident and really good :).

In a sign of the crazy times we live in, Chez Panisse has started doing takeout. First time I tried it, I got a BLT sandwich. Exactly what it says on the tin: bacon, lettuce, tomato, no weird spices or creative takes or deconstruction. Just a stock BLT sandwich—except better in every way. I'm not even sure how. I would not have thought there was that much room to improve on a BLT through better ingredients and execution, but apparently there is.

Anyway, if you're in Berkeley, I would highly recommend giving it a try.

Sometimes people just want to go have a get-together including well-trod "comfort food" style means, but with someone else (the restaurant) doing the cooking and cleanup.

I don't go to restaurants to be entertained by the food or "impressed" by the "creativity" of the chef, and I'd wager neither do most people.

Then you're looking for the equivalent of a solid takeaway place, not somewhere where you go for the "experience" and "gastronomy"

That’s just one aspect of a vibrant food culture. That is, access to multiple cuisines is a different discussion from how fancy the preparations are.

There are plenty of “sit down” restaurants that aren’t fancy, but are more than “solid takeaway” that fit in this picture. And these are what most folks actually think of when they picture dining out.

Or just about any diner.

I like how this is downvoted. HN's culture is so not the nerd stereotype that people paint it as, it's much more elitist honestly.

There's a kind of weird inverse elitism in going to a fine dining restaurant, ordering an expensive fancy grilled cheese and tomato soup combination, and bitterly complaining about it because it's not a can of Campbell's and a slice of American on white sandwich bread.

It's true that you can't buy a whole jackfruit at the grocery store in most of the US but I've always been able to find good restaurants of some variety with minimal effort. It's real hard to justify SF prices based on food options.

I often end up spending more for distinctly worse food in other American cities. It is sometimes hard to swallow paying premium prices for food and then immediately realizing after the first bite that the ingredients are subpar or there is more focus on making it Instagrammable than actually delicious

From that perspective, eating out in SF always felt like a good deal because for $15 you can get some truly exceptional farm to table food.

depends on your priorities. I would rather have nice restaurants than a nice apartment or house. I've lived in a culturally devoid suburb, where the options are fast food, or chain restaurants, and it affected my quality of life substantially.

Not everything outside SF is a "culturally devoid suburb"

No, and I think it's uncharitable to assume that's what the parent is suggesting.

But even if we expand the statement to "outside a major city" or even "outside a major metro area", I think a lot of places are culturally devoid suburbs (though I probably would have picked a nicer way of putting it).

I would wager that the majority of suburbs in the US don't have much variety in cuisine, and while communities will certainly have a few stand-out restaurants, there will also be a lot of mediocre fast food, fast casual, and pizza shops. I grew up in places like that, some of my family lives in places like that, and some friends who used to live in cities, but moved out for more space, also live in places like that.

Get too far outside Seattle, Portland, the SF bay area, greater LA, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC, Austin, Dallas, Nashville, and even many smaller cities, and there really isn't much to write home about when it comes to food. And for some of those cities, "too far outside" can be as little as a half hour drive.

> You still can't find anything but Americanized Asian food

Anecdotally, I moved from the bay area to somewhere near los angeles a while ago, and the americanized chinese food here sucks compared to what I could get in the bay area. And it costs twice as much! :(

Try the San Gabriel valley.

Try Asheville, NC

As everyone else is echoing - really not true. I grew up in Orange County which, for a suburb, has really good food options. Tons and tons of restaurants and a lot of people accustomed to nice things.

The difference in food options between SF (where I am now) and OC (or LA vs OC) is absolutely astounding. Its really not even close. Its gotten better but large cities are still orders of magnitude better.

Did you mean to write “much” instead of “orders of magnitude”? If not, please provide support for even a single order of magnitude compared to OC.

Sincerely, the League for Reducing Hyperbole on the Internet

PS: “Everybody else”, “absolutely astounding”, “its [sic] really not even close”...sit down and have a nice glass of warm milk and think about what you wrote. :-)

I live in OC now, and have traveled quite extensively as well as spent time working in the Bay. While lacking in Michelin star restaurants (only a handful) it is otherwise phenomenal when it comes to options and quality, even compared to bit cities. Now bars/nightclubs/music venues are where it is sorely lacking.

Just to make sure I understand, your saying you have better options in LA and SF than in OC? Couldn't quite make out from your comment.

Are there specific cuisines? The Indian options are pretty bad imo, there are a few good places but overall not as good as the South Bay.

LA itself is mostly suburb too though.

I think this is really true. Ive been getting great coffee and food in the smallest towns, tourist towns albeit, but metropolitan level fanciness on a gateway town to capital reef NP is impressive. I can get my fancy latte's in almost every nook in america, some might be closed on sundays though.

I would say the presence of anything nice at all and the number of choices has really dramatically improved across the country.

The quality is what it is, but at least someone is trying to give you something interesting to do.

Or at least that was the case in 2019. I really hope we return to valuing in-person interaction when it's safe to do so.

If you have to eat outdoors, a mobile restaurant (aka “food truck”) can recreate a good portion of the experience anywhere.

As one example, NYC opens Governor’s Island to the public for only part of the year. Food service comes in the form of a “food court” made up of a bunch of food trucks/container kitchens.

Sorry but this is wrong. Food scenes require diverse cultures. Small town USA doesn't have 50+ ethnic groups making restaurants downtown

By this metric food scenes can only exist in 2-3 cities in the US (or world for that matter). I think food scenes that do one or two things well are totally worthwhile and a huge improvement over bland suburban chains.

Effectively, there's never more than a dozen cities, tops, in any country in the world where you can get close to top-level food quality, and even so that applies only for a few genres of food.

Except for Italy, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Thailand, and many other countries where you can find top quality food in thousands of small towns and out of the way places. So probably not a great rule to go by.

You can get top-quality Japanese food in thousands of small Japanese towns, and top-quality Thai food in thousands of small Thai towns. However, rest assured you will have a very hard time finding (say) Mexican in either. The only places in either country where you have a genuinely cosmopolitan food scene are Tokyo and Bangkok respectively.

What is top-quality American food, and where do you find it?

Not an American, but the last time I rocked up to a random small American town and chose a random small restaurant, I had a really good turkey chili burger [1]. Hardly gourmet, but delicious, and it's quite difficult to find this kind of thing outside the US.

[1] The "Chili Monster" at the Dillinger in Boulder City, NV, in case you were wondering. https://www.thedillinger.com/ (Not to be confused with Boulder, CO.)

In addition to the burger previously mentioned, off the top of my head as "American cuisine" there's obviously barbecue, as well as Southern cuisine, Cajun/Creole, and -- while some might argue -- I'd throw in Tex-Mex and New Mexican (e.g., the state of New Mexico) as gastronomically distinct. Where you find it is, well, all over. You have to do a little research. :) But you can find really well-regarded restaurants around America for those cuisines, across a wide variety of price points.

France begs to differ. You have spectacularly good restaurants in rural areas all over the county (Michelin star good).

Sure, but you don't get the variety. If you move out to rural France but are used to rotating among eating Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Thai, etc. throughout the month, you might be disappointed with the lack of choices.

You are probably used to this rotation just because you grew up in the US. As someone who has grown up in Italy we don't think about food this way, not even regionally. I.e. don't expect a great risotto in Naples or a decent carbonara in Milan...

This isn't a US thing, it's about cities with cosmopolitan tradition. Italians are the complete opposite of this culture.

I think there is a spectrum, the US being a country of immigrants is on one extreme, Italy having been several different independent states up to 160 years ago and having many different climates and cultures is on the other. While it's true that the Italian approach to cuisine might be overly provincial I think that most of the world is closer to Italy than the US.

Being in rural France, I like trying some new foreign cuisine once in while as much as anybody else, but it wouldn't come to my mind to make it my daily routine.

Going out of your way to not eat local stuff is completely pointless to me. People take quite a lot of pride in having good stuff specific to their area.

In the Bay Area you can get, in the same weekend, excellent Vietnamese, excellent Peruvian, and excellent patisserie.

The ingredients are sourced locally for the most part, and the imports are about as good as they can get, and substitutions are sober.

The Bay Area is three or four times the size my département. It could be a country. I don't even walk more than five minutes to buy all I eat...

It's hard to share scales with Americans.

France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Basque, and Japan are all examples of places with mostly one ethnic group and great food scenes.

The best Indian food I've ever had (and I only ate there once so maybe it was a fluke) was an Indian restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic, population 400k.

I can't imagine there were very many Indian people there, but the food was amazing.

Very true! But I'd be disappointed if the only plentiful cuisine was the local one. As much as I love each of the cuisines you mentioned, I can't imagine predominately eating any one of them.

I think in Japan you could probably go to a different restaurant serving a different type of Japanese food (e.g. ramen, sushi, soba, tempura, steak... even the US has the more famous ones) and continue on for weeks before exhausting the possible options for different restaurant types, all of which count as "local" food. At least local to the country.

fair point. I think my comment was US centric. There really isn't a cuisine culture in a lot of small usa towns. Probably do to the short lived actual history of the US, and the nearly forced consumption of preservative ridden and processed food following the world wars.

This is the mindset I really don’t understand though. Sure your company can say “we’re all remote” today, but they can just as easily say “everyone has to come back” in six months. Or “everyone doesn’t have to, but those who don’t are the first laid off next time”. I’ve been fully remote since March, so I’ve been weighing this for awhile”

Many companies have publicly stated they will allow permanent work from home [1]. Many others have said so privately to their workers. As more companies adopt this, this provides more options to those who relocate and whose employer tries to pull them back.

Keep a long runway in an emergency fund, keep your professional network warm, always be ready to bounce if your employer tries to change your quality of life for the worse (mandatory return to an office somewhere, for example). (Disclosure: This is how I operate, and have worked from home for over 7 years.)

[1] https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/companies-switching-remot... ("27 Companies That Have Switched to Long-Term Remote Work")

I spoke to a recruiter at a company that publicly said they'll allow permanent WFH. He said it's on a case by case basis and you still need manager approval. It's guaranteed only till next Summer. Companies can something public with if and buts and caveats added internally.

There are always outliers. Importantly, the trend is clear.

Is it? the trend I’ve seen is wfh not work remote. Wfh still means going to the office 1-2 days a week.

And when you decide to leave your current company?

Certainly I believe that remote work was already on the way to becoming more and more accepted, but by moving out you're still limiting your employment prospects to those companies that decide not to focus more on in-person roles. Maybe that will still work out in the long-run, but I still think there's significant long-term financial benefit in maximizing your number of potential employers.

Plus, if you're expecting to move back to San Francisco at some point, right now is the time to do it while prices are through the floor. You're far better off moving in right now at a 35% discount—which is permanent given rent control—than trying to come back in another year when COVID-19 is (hopefully) over and people are flooding back in.

> And when you decide to leave your current company?

You apply at companies with remote roles. I haven't lived in SF though, and would never do so, so I can't speak to solving for timing the market there.

And a bunch of others said they would go full remote for a year. So that’s enough to make people move (including me). We’ll see in a year.

As another poster said, companies aren’t going to risk lose talent in troves if they enact a work from office policy.

When you got major companies like Twitter, google, Facebook, and others already saying WFH is a permanent option that’s put pressure on others to figure out how to make it work.

Talent is needed at many, many companies and if the talent is a.) needed and b.) good enough the company will make “exceptions” to the rule.

Enough companies make enough exceptions and it’s a mainstay policy.

Overall, the other part is that companies that now offer remote work as a permanent option may not have to pay SF salaries so that’s a bonus to the company. It’ll go both ways, the company can say I’m not requiring you to live in high COL area and we have an office in X city, we pay 10% above the market average of ~35-40 cities so they’re still competitive on pay (assumption being that most companies move to this model, FAANG may overpay still but that’s always been the case) so now what do you do?

As someone who has worked both in the Bay Area and outside of it, I moved here because of the job market, not because of the salary. I would take a salary cut any day to move away, but I want to stay with my current company AND keep access to the SF Bay Area job market.

Literally the only thing keeping me from listing my house right now and moving to a different area is that not enough Bay Area companies have committed to permanent WFH yet. Once that happens, I'm gone.

wise thinking.

there is a huge difference, not only in the kinds of work you can put on your resume, but in the quality of co-workers, and what you can learn from them.

You can approximate that experience in some other areas (Provo, Boston, Austin, San Luis Obispo, etc) but a LOT of American cities are still technological backwaters, and there's nothing available but garbage jobs that will drain your soul and turn you into a code zombie.

Where are you thinking of moving? I live here for more than the job, so just wondering what other cities are on the radar.

Come to Detroit. It's still REALLY cheap and the tech job market was #2 in the US for growth.

Depends on the exact WFH environment. If companies go with permanent full remote option, then I'd pick an area with zero or low state income taxes, warm weather, and cheap housing. Las Vegas area, South Florida. Texas is interesting but I don't know much about the cities there, having never lived or visited.

If companies look like they're aligning on more of a hybrid model where you can WFH but they expect you to show your face in the office every so often, then I'd have to stick to $CA$ and maybe head out somewhere on US-50 between Folsom and Placerville, or maybe way up I-5 somewhere towards Shasta.

Young people are extremely agile. When I was in my 20s, I could decide to move today, and by out of my apartment and into the new one by Saturday. Except for my queen mattress, I could probably still do that. Same will probably happen upon the return to SF

There’s a lot more flexibility being pondered, with only one or two days in the office instead of 5. It’s easier to consider moving to the East Bay, Modesto, Gilroy or whatever if you only have to get to the office once or twice a week. Depending on rent, a hotel and flight could even open up much of the west coast.

I think this ship has sailed. When even FAANGs start doing full time remote who would be crazy enough to go back to on-site only?

Unless upper management goes full-time remote, then power (and ambitious employees) will always consolidate.

^ ever work with someone in a remote office. I’ve always seen their careers take a hit. Same for remote employees.

It’s great when you have a family with kids and you’re less career focused. But I noticed my comp increased almost 2x their’s over the same timeframe.

It's absolutely true that the home-office staff always get the best projects, be in-contact and visible to the executive staff, and are last on the list when layoff-time comes.

This is also true when you're at a home office, and you get acquired, and it becomes a remote office. Your career gets fucked.

I've had it happen to me over and over again; and it's very different when you work at the headquarters.

It's my biggest worry about 'permanent WFH'. It's that I'll end up being like the remote-office nightmare all over again.

The eternal choice between career and quality of life. What is nice about WFH is the expanded options for improved quality of life.

If the commitment is there for WFH to become an option for all, corporations will promote one or more WFH VPs to send the message that it’s OK, as occurred for women and minorities. I’d guess they’d choose rising stars with personal commitments that make WFH the obvious humane and moral choice.

Realistically, the vast majority of companies aren't going to issue an edict like that. They're going to find a way to work with their employees.

If you have employees who have been working productively remotely for a year, it's probably better to find a way to keep them happy and working than to have to find a new employee.

For engineers, at least, were used to finding new jobs fairly quickly and easily. It’s not worth it to live in a bad situation for an unknown amount of time because you might need to find a new job sometime in the future otherwise.

The WFH is a huge part. Just moved from a tiny 1 bed near downtown LA to a 3 bed place in Chicago with lower rent. My girlfriend and I both get our own offices, we have a yard, and enough places that are half open nearby that we're pretty happy.

Please report back in February after experiencing a -40 day :)

In the north central US, you have to stay indoors for a while because it's too cold. In the sunbelt, you have to stay indoors for a while because it's too hot. In CA, you have to stay indoors for a while because of the poor air quality.

Take your pic. CA folks seem to think the rest of the world is an inhospitable wasteland. Sure, CA is a bit more mild, but it's not perfect.

> you have to stay indoors for a while because it's too cold

The advantage with cold is that it’s possible to do something about it. You can always layer up and get better materials for your layers. I spend hours skiing outside at like -15F and am actually comfortable. In hot weather though, once you’re sprawled out naked on the ground, you’ve exhausted your means to get cooler without some kind of machine.

In CA, you have to stay indoors for a while because of the poor air quality.

Maybe once or twice per decade is the AQ so bad in CA you have to stay indoors. As opposed to weeks or months every winter (depending on your tolerance - I hate cold).

> Maybe once or twice per decade is the AQ so bad in CA you have to stay indoors

We definitely had stay-inside days this year and last year, and I could have sworn we did the year before as well. That blew through your per-decade quota in recent consecutive years.

I fully expect we'll have some stay-inside days next year too.

But I do agree that the number of days the air quality is bad just does not come close to the number of days where it's really cold or really hot in other places.

The entire Western US is in the midst of a climate change-induced super drought that is worst in at least 1400 years, probably longer. The air quality is degrading due to huge swaths of the area being engulfed is wildfire. Perhaps your statement was true for the past few decades, but certainly not now. Its not a fluke, its the new normal.

Sweet summer child.

Summer in the north, winter in the south.

Air quality is getting to be a national issue. I think even Wyoming had some issues this season?

The problem is environmentalists don't want to do planned/controlled burning anymore, hence, the things burn by themselves on their own schedule now, out of our control.

I can't speak for the US, but in Australia this argument has been used as an untrue talking point being pushed by climate-change deniers. A cursory google indicates to me that in CA prescribed burns have actually been increasing over the last few years, so I suspect it's probably the case in the US as well. In Australia it's clear that the higher frequency of catastrophic wildfires is a direct consequence of climate change.

NYC -> DC corridor suffers from none of that.

I grew up in Jersey and Maryland. The summers were quite hot, and the winters were quite cold. One winter in MD it snowed so much that heavy ice formed on power lines and took them down; power was out for six days.

Spend a few hundred dollars on some quality winter gear and don't worry about it.

Wear layers. A scarf makes a huge difference. Probably larger than you would think.

Chicago will probably get a "polar vortex" in February or March. It will be a week of really cold weather and then it will be over. You'll probably find that November and December are warmer than you expected. January is a bit dreary, but only because of the reduced daylight hours (compared to LA). Chicago is just a bit further north than NYC, but compared to Paris or London it gets a lot more winter daylight.

The think I've noticed about winter since moving to Chicago is that the really sunny days are the coldest and the cloudy days are warmer. If you've got large south-facing windows, you might need to close the shades or even open the window slightly when it is really cold. That sun can be intense!

>That sun can be intense!

For the two hours a day it's out!

Obviously an exaggeration but you can go to work in the dark and drive home in the dark on the shortest days of the year. Can be a real bummer for those that didn't grow up like that.

I live in New England and a bunch of people have moved up here from all over. I'm most curious about how they handle it getting dark at 4pm and everything being closed by 9.

Chicago doesn't get -40°. When I was in Champaign (admittedly, that's ~100mi south) for 6 years, exactly once did we have windchill reach -40°. Your typical "coldest low" in Chicago will be single-digit degrees Fahrenheit.

Per Wikipedia, Chicago's record extreme low is -25°F.

It hit -23F in January 2019 and below -30F in some of the suburbs. It’s almost a meaningless distinction when it’s that cold.

-40F is with windchill. We had a few days this past winter with it.

The winter gets cold. Big deal. From the way people talk these days you would think that human beings will shrivel and die if the temperature dips below 50F.

-40C or -40F?

-40°C = -40°F.

I’ll bet $20 that GP knows that.

I grew up even further north, so I'll be fine ;) Plus, work from home! You just don't go outside!

There are no -40 days in Chicago, but I'll agree the winter is unbearable. I don't mind the cold. I mind the never ending cold. December + January are fine, February is depressing, but March and April really are awful.

Even worse than the cold imo is the 'about to be cold' weather preceeding and following winter. Rain that freezes overnight and encases your car right when you have to run to work. Muck and mud everywhere the minute you step off a path. Everything green turns to brown. Coupled with the limited daylight and it's depressing, frankly.

I grew up there, and really the worst part was that stretch in February where it's overcast every single fucking day.

Then there's the humidity with 100+F days in the summer. And mosquitoes.

The other problem was I grew up in a reasonable, livable suburb, and now, when I go back there, I see that rents and housing are really extremely expensive compared to salaries. Jobs suck (there's no real tech industry anymore). And traffic in the suburbs is constant gridlock wherever you go. It's become a real horror show and I couldn't ever contemplate moving back. Weather/Climate is not even the consideration.

When the polar vortex dipped down in 2014 and 2019, wind chill did get that low in Chicago. I think it actually hit -50 F on the coldest day for one of them.

Compared to other big tech-hub cities, I'd think SF would be one of the better ones to spend the pandemic in. There's great parks like Dolores, Lands End, etc, and they'll still be comfortable to be in during this winter. Is there more to it than that?

SF is indeed a nice city and better than many in terms of parks and outdoor amenities. However, the space at home, when you WFH, is pretty rough.

If you take what a typical couple pays for SF rent you can buy two houses in most of the US. So... if you're going to be spending a lot of time at home, for many people it makes sense to move out to a cheaper and more spacious locale, at least for now.

agreed -- portland is right there with very similar recreational activities and literally 25% the rent. why rent a 1b1b in SF when you can rent a mansion right on washington park for the same price?

Not everyone can stand the Pacific North West weather. https://www.reddit.com/r/askportland/comments/53okby/moving_...

That's a fair question, and the answer will depend on what people emphasize in life. I'll venture a firm answer for SF:

Though SF is no New York, it is notably more urban than Portland. San Francisco is physically more strikingly beautiful than Portland, with magnificent views of the bay and ocean from the hills. Portland is surrounded by beautiful forests and parks, but so is SF - you can get from downtown SF into the middle of a quiet redwood forest in about 25 minutes, and the coast, north and south, is far more accessible than it is in Portland[1]. While SF has a severe problem with street addiction and mental illness, so does Portland, and SF does still have extensive walkable urban and semi-urban neighborhoods. Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and Crissy field are just a few of the outdoor options within the city. There are also plenty of options to live in lower density, SFH neighborhoods with small backyards. Culturally, San Francisco is much more diverse than Portland - SF actually ranks first among US cities in the number of languages spoken by 1000+ households. Portland is overwhelmingly white and has a historical hostility toward ethnics and immigrants (some believe that the anti-Californian sentiment has roots in hostility toward Catholic and darker skinned immigrants) - and, ironically on the other side of the political spectrum, a lot of immigrant or first generation communities are actually uncomfortable with predominantly white, left wing progressive politics. Immigrants may be more likely to find a community in SF than Portland.

[1] I surf, which makes Portland a hard pass for me, though that's a bit too niche for a general comparison.

You make excellent points -- the point related to culture is the most common I've heard from people outside Portland (particularly non-white people).

I think the only things you omitted are the differences in weather and the size of the cities.

- Portland is a fairly small city (especially inner portland) with a long history of anti-growth sentiment. The result is very rural agricultural areas _just_ outside of Portland.

- The weather patterns bring different wildlife and kinds of beauty. While the forests outside SF are quite pretty, they are also very different than the wet douglas fir forests up north. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- Portland also extends into the hills and provides famous views of Mt. Hood from the SW hills. The portland zoo for instance, is like going from a city into a rain forest.

The oregon coast is cold and rainy 95% of the year, not the most fun place to visit.

Portland is really nice, I've enjoyed my trips up there. I was positing an answer to the somewhat open question of why someone wouldn't leave SF for Portland. I think there are compelling reasons why someone would prefer to stay in SF, but nobody would need to explain to me why they prefer Portland! I can see all kinds of reasons someone would prefer it.

Portland is right by Hood River if you kitesurf (which, despite 17 years of regular surfing and only 2 months of kiting, I've decided is objectively better)

The positives have to out weight the negatives of high crime, a large homeless population, high rents, small apartments, etc. Having nice parks is not unique to SF.

The actual reason people are leaving the city are high rents and small apartments. How the hell do you work from home when you're sharing a place with roommates? And affording extra space for an office given current rents is a huge problem.

Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed.

Homelessness is objectively worse, as in higher counts, in SF. Up 72% since 2011. And it is subjectively worse, as enforcement has dropped and homelessness has spread, become more bold, more petty crime, and caused a bigger disruptions.

https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/5380756_sanfrancisco2019....

> Crime and homelessness, while problems, aren't major factors for people in my experience. After all, those two things haven't really changed

I disagree. Its consistently brought up, along with high rent, as one of the worst parts of living in the area. In my experience, the people who stay in SF are willing tolerate it for access to all the amenities there. When the pandemic makes it difficult to enjoy those amenities, it will drive people away.

no... but neither is having a problem with street addiction and mental illness. SF has it bad, no doubt, but on recent (<5 years) to Seattle, Portland, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee, I did see the extent to which this isn't purely a SF problem. NY was actually the best of the bunch, remarkably, though last time I was there was 6 years ago, and things have deteriorated remarkably in SF even in the last 10 years, accelerating in the last 5, so this may be less NY vs SF and more 5+ years ago vs now.

You are certainly not wrong. This is a major problem in many places in the country. It's gross. Portland and Seattle are definitely much worse than SF. LA is much nicer than what it used to be, and still better than SF, but I grew up in LA so I have the natural tendency to ignore everything bad with it.

I hear you. San Franciscans historically had an extremely obnoxious tendency to only see the negative side of LA. Seems like it's fading a bit, though, partly because SF's are too severe to stay smug, and partly because LA keeps getting more interesting. I grew up in SF but moved to LA for a while in the late 90s to work in the software side of film compositing/editing. Finally opened my eyes to how much fun it is. My guess is that with electric cars and more urbanization, LA will may well become a warm, crowded, culturally varied and ethnically diverse place with sprawling suburbs and dense urban areas, a lucrative and creative entertainment sector and somewhat smaller tech sector, clean air and water, beaches, and eternally lousy traffic.

Did you work for Dolby or RED? I've always thought it'd be fascinating to work in software for pro film production. I'd really like to hear anything you have to share about your experience.

Don't forget school districting based on Game of Thrones

And if you haven't heard, all the public school names are going to be renamed, since people like Lincoln and George Washington were terrible people who shouldn't be celebrated /s [1]

[1]: https://abc7news.com/renaming-sf-public-schools-school-name-...

I don't know why you were downvoted. Even if someone supports renaming a school called Lincoln to something else, the ... extreme nature of such a thing is a consideration for people to consider whether or not SF is a nice place to live. Because there are people in charge making decisions like this, and people in charge wield power, and if you live in SF you'll be subservient to these leaders.

I'll add, the fact there are people who downvote information is quite possibly another strike against SF.

I think the downvotes fall into two categories. Some people agree with the renaming, and others just don't care either way. In a subthread about why people might want to move away from SF, "they're going to rename some schools" is not particularly relevant, and comes off a little flamebaity.

My personal opinion is that some of the renaming is a bit over the top, but I'm glad we're re-examining our historical "heroes"; most of what kids read in their US history classes paints an idealized, unrealistic picture of these figures, and ignores real harm they caused, both by their actions and attitudes. Regardless, I just frankly do not care whether a building is named Lincoln High School or John Doe High School. If ditching Lincoln's name makes a bunch of people feel more comfortable, it's no skin off my back.

What's actually important is that we teach the truth, and all of it. When we teach kids about Thomas Jefferson, we should certainly give him credit for the statesman he was, and for what he did to free the US from England. But we should also teach how he owned slaves throughout his entire life and saw no problem with that, and how he was a rich, elite landowner who believed that only a very small, single-digit percent of the population should be allowed to vote. Even Washington, who seemed not entirely comfortable with slavery, owned a slave that was only set free upon Washington's death. And Lincoln... well, his main concern was keeping the Union together. If that ultimately meant allowing the South to keep slavery intact, he was fine with that.

I don't bring all that up to say that they were awful, irredeemable people with no positive qualities. Some of them, if born today, might grow up with very different attitudes. But I think it's reasonable to suggest that quite a few people, especially non-white people, might not be particularly comfortable sending their kids to schools named after these people. And it's perfectly ok that they feel that way.

Of course it's relevant. It says a lot about the local government, about their priorities and perhaps about the people who live there that led to it. Their attitudes on this are reflective of their attitudes on other things. The exodus is being driven at a surface level by the lockdowns, but by now the lockdowns are well past the point of being driven by leftist ideology. See:

https://www.city-journal.org/california-race-coding-criteria...

End of lockdowns in CA are being tied to vague "racial justice" goals. These things are all connected. Renaming a high school says "we consider this the most important thing we could be working on right now" which is clearly absurd when you consider the real problems CA has.

I assumed "everybody knows" that Lincoln was not a super abolitionist. And "of course" it's ok if people don't regard him as a super hero.

But despite being a lifelong Democrat there is a certain level of concern over purity that makes me uneasy. All my Jewish cousins who were in Europe mysteriously disappeared during WWII. Yet, I own and enjoy a German car whose corporate origins are very intertwined with the history of that period of time. I think the Apollo program was pretty cool, and that was fundamentally rooted in the exploitation of German expertise from rocket research involving Nazi slave labor during the war.

So, if someone is disgusted with these things and personally avoids them, that's cool. But if they are on a crusade to purify society from them, I probably don't want to be neighbors.

And you definitely don't want them as an _unelected_ committee member with authority to decide the direction of your children's educational future.

I do think a community should decide. I don't think outsiders should be telling people they have to keep the school named after Lincoln, if they want to change it, democratically.

>The names of presidents and other political and historic figures could soon be purged from SFUSD schools. This includes George Washington, Diane Feinstein, even Abraham Lincoln.

What did Diane Feinstein do? :)

Go to Tennessee and ask that. Be prepared to listen for a long time.

I think most people who leave during the pandemic aren't leaving for equal-sized apartments in other cities.

I think they're leaving for places where lower land prices mean homes with more space - which could mean the suburbs, smaller towns, or could even mean moving back in with their parents.

I know people, in London, where three 20-something couples were renting a three-bedroom house, living 2 people to a room. They barely had room to set up comfortable desks and chairs for everyone, let alone things like exercise equipment. Some of them decided temporarily moving back in with their parents wasn't such a bad idea after all...

Yes, there are good parks in the city, but even back in June I thought some were too crowded for a pandemic. You also have access to lots of nature and hiking within a reasonable drive of the city, but that only works if you have a car or trust a rental company to disinfect thoroughly.

The hard bit is the live+work space. I was incredibly lucky that I moved to a larger place right before the shelter-in-place order hit (from a loft to a condo with walls and doors!), but I know a lot of people who have been working on dining tables and sub-optimal improvised desks for the past seven months. If you live in a loft-style place with another person, the lack of personal space can really get to you.

Go to denver/boulder. You get snow on occasion, but it's gone the next day, and the whole state is a park. Plus Skiing, 300 days of sunshine, and while the housing has become much more expensive, it's still way less then California.

Colorado is horrible. Denver gets 10 feet of snow every winter. Austin is way better.

To each his own I guess.

Austin is nice, but comes no where close to the natural beauty of Colorado. I'd put it 2nd the West Coast.

Texas is just flatness and trees. The rivers are nice though.

I'm reminded of the

  SMATTERING OF QUOTES FROM THE ULTIMA VII TEAM

section in the USECODE file from Ultima VII, specifically

  "Looks like shit... could be west Texas."
  - PHILIP

...... because apparently my brain remembers free association tidbits like the above that I found while (cluelessly) digging in binary game data files ~27 years ago.

Who cares about the weather? For the price of an apartment in SF you could easily have 2 apartments in different cities. Get one in Colarado for when you want to snow ski and get one in south Florida for when you want to water ski.

Don't know about SF but the so cal parks were closed, even the beaches in some cases. Heavy fines if you are found in the park.

My favorite restaurants are all closed and you have police state ensuring you don't use public facilities. Why would I pay $4000 a month for housing with none of the benefits?

If you want access to parks and nature, you don't need to spend SF prices to get it. Other places on the west coast are warm during the winter and have parks.

And you're discounting the fact that they will still be living in a tiny apartment compared to other areas with much lower housing prices.

I’ve seen a lot of folks come to Arizona during the pandemic, and I think more will move here. Outside of the summers, which aren’t that bad because you have A/C, and in the summer you’re an hour from being in the forest with pine trees and three hours from Flagstaff where it’s great weather year round (plus a ski mountain in the winter) you got a lot of folks from California coming & staying while looking at much more affordable housing & taxes.

Especially as Arizona has become more and more liberal/left leaning, you got less folks viewing it as hostile & enjoying the fact you have a lot of hiking/outdoor activities, rivers, lakes and camping all within a short driving distance.

I'm a transplant here, and I feel like I'm living in a weird post-apocolyptic nightmare with all the Trump signs and Trump flags on their giant lifted trucks. I really hope that this state can pull it's head out of Joe Arpaio's ass, and wriggle leftwards a little bit.

I think the weirdest and most noticeable thing is people riding motorcycles without helmets.

That said; yeah, the heat is not really that bad (it took me about 2 years to acclimate), and there are options for relief. Surprisingly, I think we get more rain in Arizona than in California (not this summer though), and winters are definitely much colder in Arizona than they are in California.

SF wasn’t fun before the Pandemic. I’ve visited friends who work in tech 3 different times the past 5 years. The city lacks culture, the food and drinking scenes suck, and the people are all the same.

(I spend most of my city time in miami, nyc, and montreal)

SF literally has an award winning food and drink scene, but you go off king. Sounds like you were spending time in the wrong places. Please enjoy Miami

Oh yay an award “one hand clap” eye roll

I think this as many other things are highly subjective.

One might say that something that could be considered a fairly good indicator of a "good" food-scene would be this: https://www.statista.com/chart/16308/michelin-restaurant-us/ Where SF is no 2 in the country for number of Michelin star restaurants. Again as the first sentence states; one might argue this is not the indicator of a "good" food-scene but I guess we'll have to take what we can in terms of objectivity to try to judge a city on different things, and for food this is at least for high earners, probably a somewhat good indicator.

This is what tech money does to a city. Rents go up, everybody interesting leaves for places they can afford without a ludicrous salary.

No, this is what not building things does to a city.

NYC is mostly run by finance money, which must be at least as pernicious as tech money right?

You have a point, and there are parts of NYC that are very heavy finance workers, but I'd point out a few differences:

- You'd have to include SF, San Jose and Oakland together to equal the size of NYC (and much of that SF metro area is single family home suburbs with no one on the street at night)

- Tech workers concentrate in SF proper because there is not much outside of it (yes, there is, but SF is the core)

Just my take, but SF seems to revolve around tech, while finance is big in NYC, it's not the dominating industry like tech is in SF.

So manhattan is to sf as nyc is to the bay?

you ignore a lot of other industry around the bay and around nyc. Neither Queens nor Fremont are representative of the other areas, neither is Brooklyn or Oakland. Or Berkeley. Or Bronx.

But only tech money does that?

way better than san jose

I don't know - Microsoft is moving to essentially the Github model of letting people live where they want.

This is a fundamental shift and broadening and many people lived in the city for access to jobs that now they can live elsewhere for.

> Microsoft is moving to essentially the Github model of letting people live where they want

My understanding is that at Github working remotely is the norm, while I believe the changes Microsoft announced require manager approval if you want to work remote > 50% of the time.

I am not American, what is considered "a tiny apartament", how many square meters are we talking about?

It depends but anywhere from 30-50 square meters. In SF anything over 90 square meters is considered a large apartment.

therefore I’m moving for a year or so until things fully reopen

Do you see an end to this pandemic in the next year or so? A good percentage of people are still refusing to wear masks, we aren't anywhere closer to a vaccine etc. I am trying to be optimistic, but the situation isn't improving from any direction and we are already 10 months in :(

It's a fair question, and for me the answer is open-ended. I expect this to last at least another year, but I really have no idea when things will feel "normal" and "safe" again.

In what sense are we not closer to a vaccine? I’m not following vaccine development closely, but my understanding is that many candidates are progressing along nicely.

Just today, for example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/13/covid-vacci...

It's important to point out that while these trials appear promising, there has never been a vaccine developed for any coronavirus before that eradicated the illness in humans[0]. Influenza vaccines, for example, work to fortify the immune system from various strains of influenza, but they do not prevent illness. There's a lot of political and commercial pressure to make this happen, but the reality is that this is an incredibly hard problem to solve and we may be dealing with COVID-19 in some form for the foreseeable future.

0: https://www.uchealth.org/today/coronavirus-vaccines-101-what...

Covid has already got to the point where it's more likely that you'll die in a car accident than of covid... so I think with something like the flu vaccine is probably good enough.

Motor vehicle deaths per year in the US are under 40,000. In less than ten months, more than 210,000 people in the US have died of COVID. You're an order of magnitude off.

That’s extremely routine procedure for any trial. When there’s an u explained illness the trial is halted to investigate if it is linked to the vaccine or not.

If it isn’t, the trial resumes.

No question there.

I wasn’t speaking to the GP’s question about progress but to their “not following the news” comment.

I apparently should have made that clear.

I don't think the downvotes here are fair. Drug development is hard. Most candidates never make it to market. This is a vaccine for a virus that's never been successfully vaccinated against.

Expect a majority of the vaccines in trial to fail over the next 6 months, either for safety or efficacy.

> This is a vaccine for a virus that's never been successfully vaccinated against.

For lack of economic need. Most coronaviruses only cause mild symptoms, so there's not been a need for one. SARS vaccine efforts died early because the disease itself died out and there was no impetus to continue searching. MERS is similar in that, even though it hasn't gone away, it burns itself out so quickly that the need for a vaccine is relatively small, and therefore research efforts have been limited.

> Drug development is hard. Most candidates never make it to market.

For vaccines, something like 80+% that make it past Phase 2 end up making it past Phase 3. Its unlikely for most vaccines that make it that far to fail. We already have half a dozen candidates around the world at that point, with more on the way. If anything, its highly unlikely we won't find some kind of vaccine. If not one that grants sterilizing immunity, one that provides enough protection that it makes the disease far less deadly, like the flu vaccine.

For lack of economic need.

Exactly, and because of lack of economic need our experience with creating vaccines against coronaviruses is pretty minimal.

And yes, I agree that we'll get something, but people should be prepared for a few of the vaccines to fail, a few to be pretty mediocre (are they worth even getting) and a few that actually have some utility. The challenge is the ones in development are strung out along a pretty long timeline, so if we're lucky, one of the earliest ones works and we don't have to wait until late 2021 for something worthwhile.

And not only that, but people should expect something promising to be approved and then likely pulled off the market 6-9 months post-approval. It's just the nature of trying to accelerate a vaccine and then once approved, dosing tens of millions of people with it.

Wearing masks won't make this end any sooner. Reducing transmission rates flattens the curve meaning smaller spikes but likely longer presence of corona virus.

Unfortunately when rationality and ideology conflict, ideology tends to win.

I disagree that it's a demand problem alone. There was tons of new construction. If I wanted to, I could have moved to any neighborhood in the city on a whim... As long as I was willing to move into a brand new luxury apartment $4k studio.

The demand was high for reasonably priced older units. "Just add new construction" doesn't work if all that gets built is luxury apartments.

Again, think on the margin. If there’s suddenly a lot of new luxury apartments then those looking for something cheaper have less competition from the deep pocketed. If they build so many luxury apartments that prices for them break that’s also a victory condition.

It's not so simple. The newer buildings were constructed at a much higher cost than the old ones and they are priced accordingly (and with less flexibility to go down in price). In spite of the price tag and the 'luxury' appellation, they really are not that nice (they tend to be small and the gym/pool that comes with the apartment is closed during Covid. Consequently there is a subtle structural shortage on apartments that doesn't go away by simply building more apartments. If it were possible to build apartments at a lower price with more space per unit in the city then it would be a simple matter of total housing stock. As long as housing stock is differentiated in price and quality a shortage can endure even with an increase in total supply (rent controlled units for example will always be in short supply regardless of new construction).

> As long as housing stock is differentiated in price and quality a shortage can endure even with an increase in total supply (rent controlled units for example will always be in short supply regardless of new construction).

If you build enough quality housing you end up with old crappy housing being impossible to rent out so it either gets abandoned or redeveloped. If you build enough housing the price floor that is rent control ceases to bind because market rates drop below the floor. There can absolutely be a “shortage” of a given combination of quality and price but that’s like saying there’s a shortage of Peter Norvig talented Computer Scientists who’ll work for $50K a year.

New housing is always for the richer. Those who want a deal go for older ones. However when there isn't enough construction those who are willing to pay for new go for used as well driving all costs up.

That said, housing can be profitably built cheaper, but why would any sane developer make a low price house when there is more profit in luxury housing. SF has refused to allow enough construction to meet demand, and this has resulted in only luxury being built.

Cities with less growth than SF are building more than SF, and as a result all housing is cheaper.

The price is mostly the land underneath it. Fancy countertops don't make rent go high.

No, but SF's byzantine planning and approval process jacks up the total cost to build to the point where it doesn't make financial sense to build low-end housing. That means the developer has to increase sale prices in order to turn a profit, which in turn means new landlords need to charge more rent to just break even.

If you consider that a newly constructed 750 sqft 1BR apartment can easily run $800k-$1M, a buyer is looking at $4-5k per month to cover the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, HOA, maintenance, etc. Do you really think a buyer is going to turn around and rent it out for $2k/mo?

For buildings wholly owned by a leasing company, the economics are better, but still not to the point where they're going to rent that out for under $3-4k/mo.

I'd argue that new construction is inherently a luxury just because people are willing to pay so much more for it. You can't just directly build reasonably priced older units, any more than you can directly build beater cars.

>> build beater cars <<

Didn’t stop Elon...

There have been a number of studies looking at this, but the TLDR is that globally most new construction is and always has been high-end compared to the surrounding market. What typically happens in a healthy market is the rich overwhelmingly live in new construction (or remodels), and everyone else lives in the places that rich people lived in 10, 15, 20, or more years ago. Since construction is durable, a luxury apartment building from the 70s should still be a nice place to live as long as it has been maintained. And if lots of nice new stuff has come in since then, the old stuff should be in less demand and therefore affordable.

For well-studied examples of this, see Japan: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

In NYC, things are actually moving in reverse. In properties where the poor lived 10, 15, 20 years ago the rich live now.

> "Just add new construction" doesn't work if all that gets built is luxury apartments.

Building more luxury apartments creates more older units.

Rents would be higher in the shitty apartments if those new ones weren't built.

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